On Saturday Gravitywell attended Bristol’s first IT MegaMeet, a conference that brought together 20 of Bristol’s user groups.  Over 200 delegates attended mainly made up of web developers, programmers and students.

Here is a selection of just some of the user groups involved:

PHP South West

PHP User Group, meets 2nd Wednesday of every month in Bristol, UK. We typically have one or two speakers each month. Topics cover PHP or related technologies. In the past we've had talks on Doctrine 2, Zend Framework optimisation, redis, BDD with Behat, unit testing database code with DBUnit, experiences with Amazon Web Services, etc.

Bristol Usability Group

The Bristol Usability Group is a community of individuals who are interested in the fields of user experience, usability and human-centred design. Our members include academics, freelancers, students, and employees of SMEs and multinational corporations.

Currently, we have more than 500 members signed up on our online community, and regularly get 40-50 people attending monthly events. All events are currently run on a voluntary basis, with individual members or corporate sponsors covering costs such as venue hire or web hosting.

Bristol SkillSwap

Free to attend technical talks on a wide variety of computing topics.

Bristol Hack Night

The Bristol Web Developer/Designer Hack Night is a weekly gathering every Wednesday for Geeks to meet up. It provides an opportunity for people to work on their pet projects, bounce ideas around, look at a problem as a group and find people they can collaborate with. It's aimed at people interested in the Web, however, anyone who's involved or wants to get into software is welcome. We draw people in from startups, freelancers, agencies, large organisations through to telecoms companies so it's a great way to meet people and get an idea about what else is out there.

Bath Digital

Bath Digital represents a collaboration between a range of tech-focused groups which meet regularly in Bath. These include:

• Bath SPARK - a networking group of tech entrepreneurs which meets quarterly,
• BathCamp - an annual barcamp as well as a monthly meetup where invited speakers give short talks,
• openMIC - a mobile-focused barcamp which meets quarterly
• Creative Bath - a group for creative people and industries in and around Bath
• Most recently, we have also run our first Digital Festival, a series of 28 events which ran over 10 days and saw around 2,500 people coming along.

The conference allowed each group to introduce themselves with short 10 minute talk followed by a half an hour talk on various IT related subjects.  There was something for everyone ranging from ‘How to get a Masters in Software Engineering’ and ‘How to get a Job in IT’ to talks on PHP, Django, and Ruby on Rails to even ‘Mind Control your computer’.

There were plenty of breaks to allow for networking and the day ended with an after party with a free bar, pizza and BBQ.  Lyle Hopkins did a great job in organising the event and for an ‘Alpha release’ it went very well.  It can only get bigger and better.

If you are interested in finding out more about what’s happening with Bristol’s users groups just check out Bristol’s Web Folk's calendar for full listings.